Many emotional aspects of communication (e.g., tone, body language, inflection, and other emotional aspects) are missing in electronic communications. For example, text messages communicated with instant messaging applications may lack the emotional information that may have otherwise been communicated though emotional aspects such as body language and facial expressions. Without emotional information, recipients of electronic communications may misinterpret the electronic communications.
An approach to communicate emotions with electronic communications is the use of emoticons. In general, an emoticon is a sequence of alphanumeric characters that are intended to convey an emotion. For example, the alphanumeric characters may represent a human facial expression that are intended to convey an emotion. Examples of human facial expressions include alphanumeric characters “:-)” that are intended to convey a smile, the alphanumeric characters “:-(” that are intended to convey a frown, and the alphanumeric characters “:-o” that are intended to convey shock. The emoticons may be added to electronic communications (e.g., at the end of a sentence) to provide emotional context.
A drawback of emoticons is that the emoticons cannot convey a large range of emotions because the emoticons are limited by the alphanumeric characters. For example, emoticons cannot be used to differentiate between various degrees of happiness (e.g., happy, slightly happy, very happy, and extremely happy) because, for example, the fine subtleties of various smiles cannot be defined by alphanumeric characters. Further, emoticons are limited to text based messages because emoticons are based on alphanumeric characters. Thus, for example, emoticons cannot be used with electronic communications such as photographs, diagrams, and forms.
Additionally, program applications do not have cues to prompt a user to create emoticons and do not provide a graphical interface to create emoticons. Users therefore must memorize the sequence of alphanumeric characters that define the emoticons. Accordingly, users may easily forget to insert the emoticons in the absence of the cues or may not insert emoticons because they cannot remember or quickly generate the sequence of alphanumeric characters that define the emoticons. As a result, the electronic communication may lack emotional context.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for continuing efforts to improve communication of emotions with data.